The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Traditionally, the financial community has been interested in specific asset classes or economy sectors which have well defined characteristics and whose relationships to other asset classes and sectors are well known. Examples of specific asset classes with well-defined characteristics are stocks and bonds, which have relationships that are well known and widely used. Thus, the analysis tools presently used in the financial community are usually custom-made to perform specific analytical tasks based on well-known asset characteristics and relationships.
However, the financial community is becoming more and more interested in finding relationships and performing analysis across a wider variety of asset classes, economy sectors, countries, and markets. For example, with the rise of hedge funds this type of wider analysis is very useful in determining trading hypotheses that can be back-tested and used to determine the financial risks involved in particular trading strategies or other types of market exposure. While the data for different assets and economy sectors provided by stock markets and exchanges is becoming more and more accessible, the currently available analysis tools are not capable of performing accurate analysis over large data sets that involve wide variety of asset classes and other categories of interest.
The currently available analysis tools (for example, spreadsheet applications) are inadequate in allowing non-technical users to handle complex and technically challenging analysis of data sets that involve a large number of asset classes. Further, the currently available analysis tools are poorly suited to enabling different users to collaborate and share trading strategies and to exchange trading models at an abstraction level that is higher than the mere data to which formulas and statistical computations are applied.
The necessity of finding relationships among a wider variety of asset classes and the drawbacks of currently available analysis tools place at a serious disadvantage any organizations and individual analysts that may otherwise benefit from diverse, complex, and accurate analysis of market conditions that pertain to a wide variety of assets. For example, the ability to accurately determine time periods during which particular assets satisfied particular market conditions may be beneficial in back-testing trading hypothesis and determining future trading strategies.